Custom Badge Design — If your customer has numerous tenant companies in their building, wouldn’t it be nice to be able to print each company’s logo, in full color, on their respective visitors’ badges? Or perhaps they’d like to have the name of the employee being visited on the badge or their photo. Or maybe they want to print the expiration date/time on the badge, the type of visitor, or the areas they are allowed to access. All of these things are possible with a full-featured visitor management system.

Web-Based Preregistration — In addition to the basic features of information capture, badge printing, monitoring and reporting, today’s higher-end visitor management systems also allow any or all of your customers’ employees to preregister their visitors via the Internet or intranet. Some visitor management companies will even host this service for your customer on their own Web servers if the customer is in a building that does not have a Web server.

Access Control Integration — If your customer has an access control system in place for its employees, or if they have turnstiles that restrict access to an elevator bank or other area of the building, it might be convenient or even necessary to give certain visitors card access. This can be done through integrating the visitor management system with the access control system. For example, one leading vendor is currently tightly integrated with 20 of the major access control systems, allowing proximity cards to be automatically programmed for visitor and contractors, or enabling a barcoded badge to open a turnstile or activate an elevator bank for a certain floor.

Security Alerts — The more advanced visitor management systems will also provide a number of programmable security alerts. One such necessary alert is the “watch list,” which checks each visitor’s name against a list of people who should not be allowed to enter the building (ex-employees, estranged spouses, etc.). When a match is found, the system alerts the guard or receptionist with an on-screen message telling them how to handle the situation. Other useful alerts might include notifying an employee via E-mail that a visitor is checked in for them, or alerting security that someone who is still on the premises has an expired badge.

Employee List — A full-featured visitor management system will also provide your customer with a method for automatically importing and updating their employee list, so that when a visitor is checked in, the guard or receptionist can drop down a list of employees to quickly indicate who is being visited. The employee list could reside in their access control system, their HR database, or in Active Directory or some other open database connectivity (ODBC) program.

Networking to a Central Database — Your customer may
have multiple buildings in a campus environment or across many different states, or their building may have multiple entries, as well as a loading dock that they want to cover with tighter visitor control. In any case, the visitor management system should be capable of being networked from multiple locations to share a central database over their local area network (LAN) or wide area network (WAN).

Visitor ID Solutions Suited for An Array of Applications
Secure visitor management systems are rapidly replacing the outdated and low security paper guest logs found in most buildings today, including K-12 schools, colleges and universities, hospitals and museums, commercial and residential multitenant buildings, and government and corporate offices.

Whether your customer has a single building with one entry, or 100+ facilities around the globe, with a full-featured visitor management system they can process visitors in 10-20 seconds by automatically reading a driver’s license or business card, print a professional-looking badge with company logo and visitor photo and any other information, run reports and query the database, and authorize certain employees to be able to preregister visitors via the Internet/intranet.

Such a system will also help them keep unwanted people out of their facilities. But perhaps most importantly, their visitors and employees will feel safer knowing that each visitor is properly screened before being allowed to enter.

Howard Marson is the CEO of EasyLobby Inc., a provider of secure visitor management systems to public and private companies and organizations. He can be reached at [email protected] or (781) 455-8558.

For the complete version of this story, see the February issue of Security Sales & Integration magazine.

If you enjoyed this article and want to receive more valuable industry content like this, click here to sign up for our FREE digital newsletters!

Related Content